After 4 years of studying…

Having your own personal website as an IT student is very crucial, especially to show your projects and stuffs like that. Well, it took me 4 damn years to finally have my own personal website! I call it better late than… later, I suppose. Why did I postpone this sidequest for so long? I don’t know. I didn’t properly learn how to develop my own web application until my junior year. And that’s all thanks to a course I took as an exchange student at UW-Stout (if you’re wondering the course is CS-404 and I really like it).

Anyway, after acquiring lots of knowledge in Linux, networking, cloud computing, and finally web development, this site has come alive. So, how did I do it?

A Little Flashback

This is not the first static site I’ve made. In fact, it’s the fourth. My first attempt at making a static site generated by tools such as Jekyll and Hugo is my art website. Why did I choose a static site generator instead of a modern (albeit a little bit corpo looking) website built using various JS stacks like React or Next? Well, because I suck at frontend development despite me having years of designing experience (and I’m an artist myself damn it!) and I hate JS frameworks (but that’s another story for another day). Also I love yapping. I love the yapping part more than the designing an HTML page. However, I still want some control over how the layout works and looks, so that’s why I chose static site generator than Wordpress. So far I’ve been using Jekyll for my static sites, but I use Hugo for my personal website because I guess I like trying new stuffs.

My Introduction to Hugo

I have to be honest, Hugo is a little bit more complicated than Jekyll at first. I have issues with how Hugo manage its theme using git submodules. If I recall, Jekyll manages its theme using Gem and pulls everything to a dedicated layout subfolder of your site. In my experience, it gives me more control if I want to change or add my own layout. Hugo however, doesn’t do that. It treats themes as a “read-only” template (since you’re most probably just pulling from someone’s repository anyway unless you fork that repo) in a themes/theme folder of your site. Well, I guess it’s something I have to learn about, no need to worry too much.

So I found this risotto theme, thought it looks cool, and just start coding. I mostly follow the Hugo Quick Start documentation and the risotto GitHub repository also gives me an exampleSite layout that I followed to create the structures of my site (and generally how Hugo deals with contents, indexes, etc). After I verify that everything works locally, I started making pushes to my GitHub repository and followed the tutorial over here to automatically deploy the public folders to a dedicated branch. The last part is important so that I can deploy my site to Porkbun static hosting.

Why Porkbun though?

Oh I’m GLAD you asked, and let me tell you about DIGITAL PRIVACY!!!! Ok, just kidding. I’m not gonna waste 3 hours of your life arguing why our privacy matters and big tech is off to get us (I have made a video about that, watch it on YouTube). I heard somewhere in the Privacy Guides forum that they recommend Porkbun (some of the staff members even personally use it) because it respects your privacy. First, it protects your information when queried using WHOIS. Second, it allows you to pay using crypto, although it requires you to verify yourself before being able to sell or buy domains. Cool service, and they happen to have static site hosting!

Next Step?

EXPAND THE SITE! >:D